U.S. Reshoring: Over Before It Began? U.S. Reshoring: Over Before It Began?

In 2015, the A.T. Kearney U.S. Reshoring Index shows that, for the fourth consecutive year, reshoring of manufacturing activities to the United States has once again failed to keep up with offshoring. This time the index has dropped to –115, down from –30 in 2014, and it represents the largest year-over-year decrease in the past 10 years.

In 2014 A.T. Kearney published its first U.S. Reshoring Index. The results highlighted that even though manufacturing in the United States was clearly on the upswing, the impact of reshoring was significantly less than what press reports and pundits would have had us believe. In fact, the 2014 U.S. Reshoring Index showed that—notwithstanding the hype—the rate of reshoring actually lagged that of offshoring between 2009 and 2013, as the growth of overall domestic U.S. manufacturing activity failed to keep pace with the import of offshore manufactured goods over the five-year period. The one exception was 2011.

In 2015, the A.T. Kearney U.S. Reshoring Index shows that, for the fourth consecutive year, reshoring of manufacturing activities to the United States has once again failed to keep up with offshoring. This time the index has dropped to –115, down from –30 in 2014, and it represents the largest year-over-year decrease in the past 10 years.

Based on our data, we conclude that the reshoring phenomenon, once viewed by many as the leading edge of a decisive shift in global manufacturing, may actually have been just a one-off aberration. Indeed, the 2015 data confirms that offshoring seems only to be gathering steam, while the U.S. reshoring train that so many predicted has yet to leave the station.